Destructive/Unjust Relationships to the Land and the Nonhuman

1) abuser-victim: rage and a will to dominate taken out on an unsuspecting and largely trusting other; wanton destruction of trees and animals with no rationale; a psychotic gain from the pain of others;

2) explorer-adversary: the land made malevolent, perverse, dangerous by the brave and ultimately successful adventurer or tragic hero;

3) spectator-spectacle: a trip to the zoo, an aesthetically pleasing view, watercolour painting from a car; idealized photography;

4) scientist-specimen: a object of the scientific gaze, complete with named categories, an aura of mastery, and cultural bias/blinkers; Eurocentric classification (Linnaeus); frozen in time;

5) controller-controlled: via barriers, boundaries, deterrents, herbicides/pesticides, parks, reserves, population control, the introduction of invader species, etc.; symbolic hedge cutters and curbs;

6) user-used: economic opportunism, husbandry, the harvest, agricultural transformation and maintenance; land as avenue to wealth; single-species ecosystems artificially maintained;

7) desirous-exotic: the mysterious land, wild, romantic, aestheticized, feminized, sexualized;

8) good samaritan-pitiful: sympathy, feelings of moral superiority, appeased conscience, symbolic tokens with no shifts in thinking, parental, charity;

9) narrator-stereotype: static images, misinformed myths, useful types/categories, cliché, repetitive scenes, the land as known, stock character;

10) denial-erasure: the city-dweller, the land erased from consciousness; the insulated life; the urban annihilation of natural beings;

11) ‘gone native’-salvation: the ‘wild man’, benevolent/idealized ‘Nature’, a narrative that always seems to end badly;

12) politician-obfuscated space: deliberate misinformation, disorder, willful confusion, the evasion of the known for the sake of power, the muzzling of scientists;

13) academic-other: knowledge control, authority, identity construction around the mastery of the discourses that stands in for the land, “orientalism.”